Are you ready for Facebook-like email? Meet Fluent

Pundits have been predicting the death of email for some time now, saying that faster and richer ways of communicating are taking its place, particularly among those who have grown up with personal computing. While I don’t think email is going away anytime soon – particularly in the business world, where it creates a record of activity – I do find myself increasingly using Facebook’s Messages and Twitter’s Direct Message feature for personal communiqués.

So it’s not surprising that someone would come with something like Fluent, a new, Web-based service that renders Google’s Gmail as a Facebook-like stream. It’s currently an invitation-only beta, but you can get a demo that gives a feel for what it’s like.

Fluent was created by a trio of Australians who used to work for Google. In a story in the Sydney Morning Herald, Cameron Adams, Dhanji Prasanna and Jochen Bekmann say they became frustrated with Google’s culture and wanted to reinvigorate the state of email, which they described as “stagnated.”

The interface resembles Facebook with Apple-like design touches. It also brings in a feature that I’m surprised Google has not introduced in Gmail: real-time search results as you type.

The inbox appears like a news feed, with replies threaded for quick reading. Thumbnails of attached images appear inline. There’s a to-do list on the right side.

As with Gmail, you can see starred items and labels. But Fluent also lets you see all your attachments in one place, and displays them as a slideshow.

Clicking on any one image zooms it forward, and you can cycle through the images. It’s not clear yet how this will work with documents.

Fluent’s Adams told the Morning Herald that the service will eventually work with other email services, and it will handle multiple accounts at once.

Another feature in Fluent, which Adams said most webmail clients were “pretty horrible” at dealing with, was its focus on letting users access multiple email accounts under one log-in.

“The market that we’re going for initially is sort of independent professionals and small businesses that tend to have personal accounts [and] maybe several work accounts,” Adams said. “It’s quite important for them to be able to check their multiple accounts at the same time.”

He claimed Fluent users would be able to get through their email “20 per cent faster” than they do now.

At this point, the trio apparently have not decided whether the “basic” version of Fluent will be free. There will, however, be a premium offering that will incorporate advanced features.

Adams said that, from today, Fluent would let a limited number of users trial its product as beta users. He said the business plan was to offer the basic email experience – which might or might not be free – but also offer a premium version with features that went beyond standard email, such as offering document collaboration, file-sharing and integration with services such as Dropbox, Evernote and Google Docs.

The story does not address security, which strikes me as a concern. If you’re filtering Gmail through a third-party site, what are the safeguards against hackery? How secure is Fluent’s system?

And how will Google feel about what amounts to a competitor stripping away its ads? Yes, you can bring ad-free Gmail into any number of software clients, but this is Web-based, which hits Google in the pocketbook. Also, what happens if Fluent starts putting its own ads on the interface?

I’ve requested a beta account, and once I get access to it, I’ll offer more a more detailed look at Fluent.